If Randall Schweller were to ask me for an epigram for his provocative and erudite new book, I would suggest a few lines from William Butler Yeats’s classic poem, “The Second Coming.” In it, Yeats presented a paradoxical vision of the collapse of the post-World War I European order in which reason, stability, and democracy were careening out of control like a falcon that had slipped its falconer and begun flying in an ever-wider loop, a world soon to be supplanted by mysticism, chaos, and brute power. This metaphor presciently foreshadowed the tragic events of the 1930s and 1940s.
Rather than employ literary metaphor, Schweller looks to physics to convey his similarly paradoxical vision of the contemporary international system. The central feature of this new (dis)order is that it is simultaneously characterized by sclerosis and paralysis, on the one hand, and chaos and frenetic activity, on the other. “Entropy” (the decreasing tendency for closed systems to be able to convert energy into useful work) is his analogy for the puzzling trajectory of today’s world in which increasing randomness coexists with the brittle, ossified structures of the previous international order. Think Mancur Olson meets James Glieck and you have the flavor of Schweller’s theory of international politics for the age of entropy.
The “demon” in the title of Schweller’s book is an allusion to physicist James Clerk Maxwell’s thought experiment about how to manage entropy. In it, Maxwell imagined a creature that might counteract the inexorable tendency toward entropy by serving as a gatekeeper between two gas chambers, carefully sorting slow-moving atoms toward the cold one and fast-moving atoms toward the warm one, thereby preventing them from canceling each other out in a cloud of lukewarm gas.
The demon in Schweller’s entropic theory of international relations is hegemonic war, which, despite the blood, sweat, and tears it inevitably engenders, has the salutary effect of purging entropy from the international system. It does so through three mechanisms: by setting in motion a process of “creative destruction” that breaks the logjam of the old order, concentrating power in a new hegemon who can lead the system, and clarifying the status hierarchy of this new order for all to see.
Channeling G. F. W. Hegel, Schweller sees a “problem” today in that hegemonic war has become obsolete. The nuclear revolution, combined with the increasing globalization of economic production and distribution, means not only that great-power war is suicidal but also that it just does not pay anymore. Another irony of the age of entropy is that the latter seems more important than the former. In the absence of hegemonic war, we are condemned to live in a permanent Purgatory that may spare us the Hell of great-power war but denies us the Heaven of a predictable, stable, and productive state system.
It is very hard to do justice to the author’s complex, wide-ranging, and often compelling argument in a short space. He has surely put his finger on some unique aspects of our world as it transitions from the era of American hegemony to something that looks like a new form of multipolarity. His book is marvelously erudite—seamlessly weaving the history of physics with global history and even popular culture—and his prose is elegant and powerful. And he usefully thinks way outside the intellectual box of contemporary international relations theory and courageously flouts the strictures of modern American politics that blind us to the fact that so much of what we liked about the American Century—great-power peace, free trade, and the seeming triumph of the cosmopolitan approach to world politics—contained the seeds of their own destruction. We should be grateful to Schweller for taking the risks of writing this book.
I emphasize the “risks” because what makes Maxwell’s Demon and the Golden Apple so thought provoking is precisely what will make it so controversial and, for some people, perhaps ultimately unpersuasive. A number of issues, in particular, struck me as debatable.
First, does entropy really describe what is going on in the contemporary international system? In Schweller’s telling, the root problem is the decline of American hegemony—a function of growing national debt and eroding popular will to fight any more of the wars of choice to shape the international order that have kept our legions constantly engaged since the end of the Cold War—and the growing disorder of an increasingly leaderless international system consequent to that decline. Embracing the theory of “Hegemonic Stability”—which maintains that cooperation and the provision of “public goods” is more likely when there is a single great power willing to provide them—he sees an increasingly supine Uncle Sam, no longer willing to serve as the system’s leader, as the cause of the age of entropy.
Implicit in the theory of Hegemonic Stability is the characterization of the dominant power as a benign actor; think Atlas (or Kipling’s self-understanding of Victorian Britain), the weary titan struggling under the too-vast orb of his fate. This metaphor flatters America’s self-image as the “indispensable nation,” but it does not jibe with how much of the rest of the world views us. Global views of Pax Americana range from a relatively benign view of the United States as a clumsy elephant crashing through the jungle (sometimes inadvertently stepping on some unfortunate smaller animals) to the more malign image presented in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American (1955) through the character Alden Pyle, a Cold Warrior who combined a fanatical self-righteousness with a ruthless Machiavellianism in Vietnam.
Moreover, is it really the case that post—Cold War America has been reluctant to lead? If we measure leadership by willingness to take on new alliance commitments or fight not only necessary wars (arguably the first Gulf War and the initial overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan) but also growing numbers of wars of choice (Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti, Kosovo, Iraq, Libya, and nation building in Afghanistan, along with numerous other campaigns in savage wars of peace in the global war on terrorism), it is hard to square this picture of a tired Uncle Sam with the reality of a hyperactive post—Cold War hegemon on a perpetual hunt for monsters to destroy around the globe.
Finally, Schweller raised something of a ruckus among liberal academics (admittedly a redundant phrase) during the 2016 presidential campaign by opining in an interview with The New Yorker magazine that Donald Trump was “probably the right guy for the job. Not perfect, but we need someone different, because there is such calcification in Washington.” In a longer essay published online in The International Security Studies Forum, he connected this endorsement with his entropic theory of international relations. In essence, Trump seems to have become Schweller’s demon, the only means short of the now-obsolete hegemonic war, for purging the system (both American and global) of its increasingly suffocating and disruptive entropy.
It is a tribute not only to Schweller’s intellectual consistency but also his political courage that he would boldly go where few other academics would go in connecting his unique approach to international relations to the Trump era. But few other academics are likely to join him for this ride, most for bad reasons but some for good ones. I see the Trump phenomenon as inextricably linked to many of the features of the age of entropy that Schweller highlights, especially the calcification of the American foreign policy establishment in its continuing commitment to the zombie of American hegemony. But I am less sure that Trump constitutes the good demon that can right the system and end the age of entropy at home and abroad. In any event, a theory of international relations suggesting that what the world needs now is an America led by a president committed more to the overturning of the Establishment than to a consistent and well-thought-out international strategy will strike many readers as downright frightening.
